Online News

Mar

04

2015

5 Web Design Flaws

The worst thing about web designers is that they train and learn once. Usually at university, online courses or have just picked it up from trial and error.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Google changes the goalposts of what they want from websites to be ranked highly in the search engine every three months or so. Only Studio Ten seems to be the only agency that knows this or cares about this and changes strategy in-line with what Google wants. Web designers don't do this. Here are five major problems (there are 100s but 5 will do):

Pretty websites don't make money. Optimised, highly targeted and marketed websites make money. We have client sites that don't look nice but they make over £1m per month. We have seen client sites that look incredible but aren't even indexed after years...Which one would you choose?* -*you can have both pretty and profitable websites, though as we do web design.

Rigid strategy or lack of wanting to move with the times. Many website designers make one theme or have one style and stick to it, year after year. Profitable for them, a pain in the butt for you.

Lack of SEO knowledge. Nearly all web designers will tell you that they 'do SEO' or worse, there is a TV advert for a hosting company that provides one page websites that has SEO 'built in'. Yes SEO is the search engine optimisation of a website but you can't have it 'built in'. It needs to be carefully planned, strategised and implemented. Even then, on-page SEO (is what they mean), is just scratching the surface of what is needed from a site. You need an off-page online marketing plan to make the most of the on-page SEO. This is where we spend 100s of hours building links in an all manner of ways, from various platforms and types of links, in certain orders and certain ways that generates upwards movements in Google for your site. SEO is built-in? Don't be so silly.

Zero effort on keyword research. Keyword research is the most important part of any website's build, makeup and design. Without it, your business will depend on you going out and asking people to visit your website. Proper keyword research is done through the Google Keyword Tool (and others), looking at the competitors of those that are ranking highly for the most relevant and most searched for keywords, link diagnosis and SEO analysis on those sites, formulating a plan of action to decide on what keywords should be targeted by what pages of the website, and revisiting the Keyword Tools every few months as trends change.

Astonishing rates of pay for easy fixes. We know how much time and effort lots of tweaks to websites take and more often than not, we find that designers charge £100s for something that takes less than one minute to do.

(Number 6, even though it wasn't meant to be in here - they're all called James or Jamie! How odd is that!)

Save yourself the time and effort of dealing with these people. Contact us, we'll give you an affordable quote, a very reasonable time-frame, and it'll be set up, made perfectly, AND it will work in Google.

In this digital age, we operate globally, 24/7, 365 days a year. We have clients in London, Los Angeles, Dubai, Singapore, Melbourne (lots there!), Antibes, all over Germany, many in Dublin, a few scattered around Norway and Sweden, and Russia too.